Instagram isn’t obligated to render text in their app in a way that you’d prefer.

We can dislike a platform because it's a poor means of expression and urge people to stop using it.

You say "hey, I don't want eggplant, I don't like eggplant" and the restaurants response is to say "but eggplant is really good and only bad people don't like eggplant. You aren't anti-eggplant are you?"

It's not an issue when it's one restaurant - that's just weird - but when it starts being 90%... 95%.. when they restaurants all get together and form an anti-broccoli commission, and start colluding to make selling broccoli illegal..

When the restaurants go to the Federal Government and say they need laws making broccoli illegal?

I would point out those book bans are not banned from reading or publication.. they are banned from school libraries because they have graphic descriptions of sex. If you feel it's important for your kid to be exposed to a storybook primer on gay oral sex... I suppose you should write your congressperson.

And in banning drag shows, the prohibition is on drag shows with underage attendees, usually without parental permission. Again, if you feel your kid needs to see someone in drag hip thrust in yoga pants on a stage without your consent.. you're welcome to lobby for that as you see fit.

I will spend my time fighting and continuing to fight for the freedom of expression.

These apps limit expression because it makes them more money. But they still limit expression. Instagram doesn’t want you linking out of instagram so you stay and view more ads. Tiktok bans for off site bios because it wants less controversy so they sell more ads. Etc etc.

Being a private entity that allows users to express themselves isn’t a restriction on the types of expression you don’t allow. The default is that Instagram doesn’t exist, not that it exists and must all anything you want it to.

The question is the extent of the limitation. And what’s “reasonable.”

Instagram offers what they offer. A forum for a topic or a medium offers something to you. The fact that they’ve chosen not to offer other things isn’t a limitation on your expression, any more than my burger shop is for not selling salads.

We don't owe Instagram some sort of being nice or saying nice things. If they run a subpar business that punishes freedom of expression, we can call that out and say it sucks.

But it's absolute baloney to claim that they punish freedom of expression because the venn diagram of "content they're willing to host on their infrastructure" and "content you want to publish" aren't perfectly aligned. Calling my burger shop bad because it doesn't serve salads is similarly baloney.

As far as the first amendment is concerned, government limitation of free speech, political speech in particular, is what matters.

They are if we pass a law saying that they are. Suggesting such a law be passed is just normal democracy.

What makes you think Meta would be exempt from the same pressure Twitter received, given that Meta's platform is larger?

Or: how do we "solve for" the people-that-want-absolute-freedom-of-speech problem? Because that's the other side of the coin. Some mild restrictions on what can or cannot be said in public environments is not tyranny.

You cannot have absolutism in a well functioning country.

Tyranny is on a dimmer switch.

It's not about truth. It's about stability, safety. How do you keep a bunch of pretty hard-core fascist propagandists from stirring up the people without any repercussion? A government needs control, or it loses its legitimacy. I think that's at least implied in the main text of the constitution.

A million Iraqis probably have the same question.

Preserving the ability of the public to organize and publish freely is probably one of the foundational elements of the solution to keeping a populace from getting so hijacked. The problem is that the incumbent state and military fits your description much better and more often than any upstart group.

You may disagree with those limits but they've always been there.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Meanwhile, cultures differ, and people outside of the US may well see their own governments' drawing the lines elsewhere, for instance banning of hate speech and Nazi propaganda, as "absolutely necessary."

Yes it does. That's what subjective means.

Obviously, many people refuse to accept that their personal opinions on political matters are anything less than absolute, immutable, objective fact, but that isn't relevant, because refusing to accept that doesn't make it, or you, objective.

>Even mathematicians have differed about proofs.

Politics isn't math. There is no equation or statement that can quantify the American model of freedom of speech, nor prove it correct, much less more correct than all other models, in the same way as E=MC^2 or Pythagoras' theorem.

You think this is evidence of a "coordinated war on against freedom of expression online"?

https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-...

It's an attack on the web, to promote censorship platforms that replace it.

Break up social media into far smaller segments with the segments required to provide api for competing services and for users to download their data.

Also, the data should be obscure to the company Facebook account should only be able to encrypted junk. My friends, then are given decryption keys.

Of course, there needs to be through data auditing requirements for any large store of data, just like we mandate external audits of any large publicly traded company

"You're free to express yourself as much as you like with people you invite to your private room" is the sex motel model of free speech.

Just call it a war of hate speech or "disinformation" instead and plenty of people will admit it.

In practical terms I see the basic issue as being a lack of downvotes. Users can do nothing to combat disinformation, because every form of engagement boosts posts.

This is a personal preference you have that Instagram decided against in order to offer a slightly larger barrier to scams. Not a great example.

> This is what killed Tumblr and ruins the photography site 500px's native app.

I know nothing about 500px, but forcing PG-13 killed Tumblr because Tumblr was built on NSFW. They tried to pivot too late. Apple has never had their brand wrapped up in NSFW—on the contrary, their brand is explicitly family-friendly and this policy is designed to keep it that way.

Honestly, there may well be a coordinated war on freedom of expression, but your examples kind of suck. Each of them is trivially explained by companies pursuing their own goals in ways that are only vaguely related to each other and only tangentially related to freedom of expression.

A lot of people died. This isn't a case where people thought the wrong things and it made them vote wrong. It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.

That's what this court case is about right? I'm shocked that people think this is a case where the government should not step in. I think they should have been much more aggressive.

But yes, that is one of many Legitimate State Concerns.

for all its talk of being an open exchange of ideas, HN often devolves into exactly the opposite.

That's the issue: we do not trust the state to be impartial enough to decide what is or isn't misinformation. Remember when they lied and told us not to wear masks so they could hoard them for healthcare workers? In that instance if they had been "much more aggressive" as you advocate, saying the true and correct statements of "this is an airborne respiratory virus and you should wear a mask" would be subject to such censorship.

Given that we've seen governments carry out all manner of atrocities (eg the US CIA torturing people in the wake of 9/11 for a recent example, or the Third Reich's famous death camps) throughout literally all of human history up to and including present day without exception, by both "good" governments and "the bad guys" (also without exception), why on Earth should we allow such organizations the power to decide with force of law what is or isn't true?

A lot more people will die from direct and intentional actions by government than will die from misinformation.

Society doesn’t have a censorship problem, we have an entitlement problem. People now apparently think they’re entitled to someone else’s platform, when they’re not.

The government spends a lot of time making requests of private companies, of other governments, and of individuals. But they have a duty to avoid crossing the line and applying unfair pressure to coerce the response they want.

That’s not how the law works.

The government can’t limit speech, except in rare exceptions. Making suggestions to limit speech is still limiting speech.

You do not have an absolute right to free speech when it impinges on the free speech rights of somebody else.

But it’s very weird to me that universities run by the state must be viewpoint and content neutral in their speech restrictions even if there is no explicit law passed by the government to restrict speech but the government is allowed to employ a mass of people to make ‘requests’ and such requests don’t need to pass a viewpoint and content neutrality test. The situations are very similar because in both cases there is not an explicit law passed by the government punishing people for making bad speech.

A request from someone with power is bound by law.

I went through a ton of government contract law training. I can’t request that my contractor wash my car. I can’t “just ask” that they work unpaid labor. Etc etc.

It’s one thing if a rando or equal power requests. But a person in authority can’t do that.

Imagine all those jerk bosses saying “I just asked my secretary to perform fellatio on me. I didn’t require it. And I never even threatened to fire them.” That defense doesn’t work just like the courts found that the government requesting isn’t allowed.

You can absolutely do those things as a matter of law. You can’t do those things as a matter of policy, however. You were trained on policy, written out of an abundance of respect for the law, training it’s clear needs to be more common, but the law itself is less clear.

The government needs to follow the laws that bind it. And making an illegal request is just that.

I didn’t mean that you are legally required to follow the request.

- When two people privately chat with each other, this is not the chat platforms speech, anymore then a phone call is the phone company's speech, it is something that should fall under common carrier laws, just like phone companies.

- When someone explicitly decides to follow someone else and that person posts something, then relaying that post is not the platforms speech, anymore then delivering a magazine to a subscriber is the postal services speech.